Cocoa Beach Read online

  “In any case,” Captain Fitzwilliam went on, when the clamor died away, “we have roamed far from the question at hand. What exactly are you running away from, Miss Fortescue? I find I should very much like to know.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Tyrant parents? Failed love affair? Creditors at your heels?”

  “None of those things.”

  “Nothing left behind? No heartache, no loved ones pining?”

  I gripped the wheel and leaned forward. Stared through the windshield. The bleak, brown, lurching winter landscape. I remember I was considering how long to remain silent before starting another topic, and what kind of topic I could safely introduce. Weather or war news or staff incompetence. Something even more impersonal, like the quality of wartime coffee, and whether you could call it coffee at all. Then—

  “I have a sister.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A sister!”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Younger.”

  “Are you close?”

  “Very much.”

  “Well, then. Why the devil should you leave her behind, if you love her?”

  “Because I—”

  Well. I stopped right there, right there on the edge, right in the split second before I tumbled off. Shocked that I had crept so close without realizing. Or shocked, really, that I had allowed this man to lead me there. Why? Because he was handsome and weary and crammed with easy manners, because he was solid and smoke-scented by my side, because I was breathing the fog of his breath and he was breathing mine, and his big left knee connected with my slender right one. Because he was a doctor, after all, and how could you not trust a doctor with your miseries? That was why doctors existed.

  “Because I wanted to help,” I said instead.

  He shifted in his seat, and his knee left mine.

  “Well,” he said, tilting his head back again, crossing his arms across his ribs, “if you change your mind, I should be glad to serve as your confidant.”

  I didn’t reply. I didn’t think I could. I felt sick, perspiring, the way you do when you stand by yourself on the brink of some vertiginous cliff, and the whole world undulates around you, and you’re overcome by the tantalizing power of suicide. The death that lies within your immediate grasp. A single, easy step.

  When the silence ripened, and the road flattened, and I felt I could risk a sidelong glance, I saw that Captain Fitzwilliam’s eyes were closed once more.

  But I knew he was not asleep.

  When we wallowed into the stable-yard entrance at half past ten, the scene had changed from the day before. Two ambulances occupied the corner nearest the barn, and for a moment I couldn’t tell if they were loading patients or unloading them. I pulled the brake and the car lurched and stopped. “We’re here!” I shouted, banging a fist on the wood behind me, and I didn’t wait for Captain Fitzwilliam to stir, I didn’t wait for Corporal Pritchard to wake up and crawl from his stretcher. I jumped out of my seat and into the soft earth, and I floundered around back to toss open the door.

  Pritchard was sitting on the floor, dazed and sleepy. He lifted his head and swore. “That was quick.”

  I stuck out my hand and lifted him free. The other ambulances, I now saw, were loading men. They were headed for the railway station, for the sanitary trains to the base hospitals. From the east came the sound of artillery, a steady barrage, round after round firing into the German defenses. This time there was no returning fire, no long whistle and low, shattering explosion, but I stuck my head to the crown of my helmet anyway, as if that would protect me, and staggered through the sucking mud back to the front of the ambulance.

  Just as I ducked around the corner, a stretcher party charged from the doorway, awash in wet khaki and as urgent and muscular as a set of racehorses. I stopped just in time and flattened myself against the wall. “Watch it, mate!” the orderly said, the one in front, and for some reason this rebuke brought me back from the nauseous precipice. Reminded me, I suppose, of my own unimportance in this place. My insignificance. I was not absolutely essential; I was intruding. I was in the way. There was no impending collision. No Virginia at the center of some fearful, imagined impact. Just wounded men, who were fighting a war.

  The stretcher passed. “Go on, then,” said Fitzwilliam’s voice behind me, and I obeyed him. Crossed the threshold into the barn.

  Less crowded now. A few of the cots lay stripped and empty, and the orderlies and nursing sisters moved around like people instead of rabbits. But the architecture was the same, the brown walls, the rows of lumpy beds to the right, the curiously identical white faces stuck above each blanket, the curtains to the left that partitioned the operating theater, the recovery room, the mess and the barracks. The smell of disinfectant, of earth and wet wool and old wood, enclosed me in its familiar cloud. If I cared to listen, I could discern the restless moans, the low chatter of a hundred injured men. Like any hospital, I thought. Captain Fitzwilliam pushed past me and caught the elbow of one of the nurses, speaking earnestly, head a little bowed, so that the electric light caught the tender skin of the back of his neck, and I found that I was wrong. That the threat of annihilation didn’t matter.

  But that’s how it happens, when you have no defense, no immunity whatsoever. When you thought you were strong, and you were only untested. I made a movement, preparing to turn away, and at that instant Fitzwilliam lifted his gray-speckled head and looked at me, and his lips parted.

  “Miss Fortescue—”

  A clatter of boots overtook him, a choir of exhausted male shouts, and our heads snapped to the doorway of the barn, where a new stretcher party had arrived, flinging mud and chill onto the floorboards.

  “Damn,” said Captain Fitzwilliam. “You’ll excuse me.”

  He strode to the door, and I turned to look for Corporal Pritchard. But Pritchard had gone as well, and I was left standing alone near the entrance to the operating theater, a useless obstruction, a thick American branch tossed into the orderly flow of treatment and evacuation, treatment and evacuation. We were two years late, weren’t we? In the early months of invasion and repulsion, the race to the sea—before so many clearing stations were established, before the base hospitals were built on the northern coast, before all the manuals were written and the procedures put in place—when the trains were stuffed with casualties and the depots lined with stretchers and panic, a hospital like ours might have made a difference.

  In this brutal, methodical February of 1917, our zeal was nothing but vanity.

  I stood there, feet planted on the old wooden boards of that French barn, and watched Captain Fitzwilliam approach the stretcher and trade a few words with the man in front. Step forward and bend his head to address the wounded soldier inside. Behind them, the door was still open, and the corner of an ambulance flashed in and out of view as the driver and the orderly secured the doors. A nurse hurried past, carrying a tub of soiled and stinking bandages. Fitzwilliam stepped away from the stretcher and issued some direction to the stretcher-bearers, pointing his finger to one of the empty cots, bleached new sheets yellow-white under the electric bulbs, and I thought, It is time to go, Virginia.

  Time to go.

  I stepped aside for the stretcher party, and the soldier’s pale face jogged by. Every roof beam, the arrangement of every cot was familiar to me, as if I’d known them for years. As if I’d been born and raised here, and maybe I had. Maybe I had lived an entire new life inside the space of the last twenty-four hours, been reborn and struggled and hoped and strived, and now . . . and now . . .

  What now?

  Did I die and return to the old life?

  “Miss Fortescue,” said a voice next to my shoulder, “will you come to my office? I’m afraid some paperwork remains to be sorted out.”

  And so I came, without even striving for it, to stand inside that canvas-partitioned square that constituted Captain Fitzwilliam’s office, while he made his final notes on the papers that woul
d accompany my new patients to the Château de Créouville. He had offered me coffee, and I had refused it. I didn’t want him to see how my hands shook. I gazed at the pink lobe of his right ear and said, Of course.

  “I don’t know how to say this—I’m sure you’ll think me a little mad . . .”

  I leaned forward and gathered up the papers from the desk. He was standing on the other side; he reached out and stopped my hands.

  “You don’t need to speak. I’ll speak. I’ll tell you something I’m not supposed to tell you, which is that we’re moving. The unit, I mean. Next week. Long overdue. We’ve got a proper site, modern regulation huts, that sort of thing, just yards away from the railway, about two miles from here. Your Mrs. DeForest ought to be perfectly mollified about that, at any rate.”

  “No more barns,” I said throatily.

  “Of course we shall continue to send patients your way for rehabilitation; we stand very much in need, as I said before, of a hospital to manage all the ambulatory cases, trench foot and frostbite and that kind of thing, and while it’s not as glamorous as—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t care about that.”

  “No, of course not. You wouldn’t. But I’m afraid Mrs. DeForest has loftier dreams.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have a choice, does she?”

  “No.”

  I stared at the desk before us. My hands still rested on either side of the sheaf of documents, held at the wrist by Captain Fitzwilliam’s agile, gentle fingers. A surgeon’s fingers, trained at great expense. His thumbs lay upon the backs of my bare hands, like a pair of anchors. The intimate contact seemed at odds with our businesslike communication, but what did I know? No man had ever held my wrists like this before.

  And then his hands sprang back, as if only just realizing what they were doing, and settled behind his back. I gathered up the papers to my chest. From beyond the canvas partition came a metallic crash, an angry shout. I thought, Someone’s going to walk in, right this second. Someone’s going to see us like this, standing here without speaking. The desk between us was one of those collapsible designs, made of thin, light wood: a camp desk, bearing only a kerosene lantern, a couple of medical volumes topped by a messy leather notebook, a tin of pens, and a silver-framed photograph of a woman in a white dress.

  I said, without moving, “If that’s all, then—”

  “Wait! Damn.” He turned, stepped a few paces to the right, and stopped square. Behind his back, his thumbs dug into his palms.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Don’t call me that. Don’t call me sir, in that voice.”

  The lantern was lit, and the glow fell on the silver frame of the photograph. The metal was tarnished from the damp. From this angle, I couldn’t see the subject very well, but she seemed to be smiling. I leaned forward an inch or two and tilted my head for a better look. The photograph, it seemed, was not taken in a studio. The girl sat on a large boulder, both shoes visible beneath the hem of her frothy white dress, and she carried her hat in her hand. Her hair seemed to be escaping its pins. There was an inscription at the bottom. I couldn’t read it.

  “That’s a lovely photograph,” I said.

  “Photograph?”

  “On your desk.”

  He turned back. His face was pale, except for a pair of reddish patches on the outer edges of his cheekbones. You might have thought he would look at the photograph, but he didn’t. He looked at me instead, fixing his gaze so intently on my face, I almost turned away. Instead, I said, in a high voice, “She’s lovely. Is she your sister?”

  “Yes. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Of course not.”

  He reached inside the breast pocket of his tunic and pulled out a gold cigarette case. There were initials engraved on the outside, in plain Roman lettering. My heart beat in such enormous, galloping strokes, I couldn’t breathe. “It must be difficult, being apart from your family like this,” I said.

  “Yes. Well. We do what we must.” He lit the cigarette quickly and shook out the match. “I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we saying?”

  “I don’t recall. Something about the unit moving elsewhere.”

  “You seem upset.”

  “I’m not upset.”

  “I hope I haven’t made you ill at ease. I never meant—you see, it’s the strangest thing. Since yesterday, I have been struck—I have wanted—I want most intently—most unaccountably—to see you again, to see how you’re getting on—to be a friend, I suppose.” The cigarette twitched between his fingers. “Do you see what I mean?”

  “I—not really, no. I’m afraid I don’t. I think it would be better if—”

  “Stop!” He held up his hand. “Don’t say it, please. Don’t say some damned prim little thing about prudence and discretion.”

  I pressed my lips together.

  He turned away and stared at the canvas wall.

  “I have been wrestling with this all day, Miss—what is your first name?”

  “Virginia.”

  He closed his eyes and said Virginia. Like a prayer, like the answer to an ancient mystery. The sound of voices intensified on the other side of the canvas. Someone was getting dressed down, a few yards away. Captain Fitzwilliam sucked on the cigarette and blew the smoke out slowly, in a wide, thin stream. “I suppose you think I’m a bounder.”

  “No.”

  “Ah, but you hesitated.”

  “I—I don’t know. I don’t know you at all.”

  “May I write to you, at least? Convince you of my innocent intentions.”

  “What are your intentions?”

  “To be friends, Virginia. There’s nothing wrong with friendship, is there?”

  “I’ve often heard it’s impossible for men and women to be friends.”

  “Then let’s prove them wrong, shall we?” He stubbed out the cigarette and turned to me, and he was smiling. A little wildly, I thought, like somebody drunk. “You see, I find I can’t quite bear to cut you off so soon, like the limb of a precious new seedling. If friendship is all we’re given on this earth, why, I’ll be the most steadfast, honorable friend you ever knew. We can discuss poetry and history and botany. Whatever you damned well like. The latest sensational novel. Anything but the state of the war. God knows we’ve got enough of that without talking about it.”

  “I’m sure you have enough friends already.”

  “Yes. Well. I have had friends. The trouble is, they keep dying. It’s a damned nuisance, but there it is. One’s obliged to hunt further afield these days, when one’s old school chums no longer exist. And now you’ve dropped like a ripe pear before me. A friend. A fascinating, unexpected friend, rich with all kinds of interesting mysteries I look forward to discovering.”

  He held out his hand. I took it. What else could I do? We shook briskly. His other hand came up to seal our palms together.

  “Very good, Virginia. You can call me Simon, at least when nobody’s looking.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  He leaned forward. “Be sure. Trust me. And if you need anything, anything at all, you’ve only to ask. Your welfare shall remain uppermost in my heart.”

  His face was so close, his smile so certain and mesmerizing, I couldn’t move. I thought, I must look away, I must get away, but instead I just stood there, trapped, while his hand actually lifted mine and turned it over, palm up, and I gazed stupidly at his face. His head bent briefly as he kissed my palm, and I stared at the part of his hair, the speckled gold and silver, and thought how dry his lips felt, yet his breath was damp.

  “You see? Harmless and devoted. Your loyal English hound. I shall write when we settle in our new quarters—”

  “Captain Fitzwilliam—”

  “Simon. And you’ll write back, won’t you? And if you should happen by the CCS to pick up patients, or if I should happen by your château, on my way to the village—”

  “Captain—”

  “Simon. You’ll find a few moments to c
hat, won’t you? A little human contact in this damned squalid show—”

  “Simon.”

  Those bright, drunk eyes blinked once, the way you wake from a dream. His gaze fell to the photograph on his desk. He squeezed my hand a final time and released me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  Captain Fitzwilliam reached into his breast pocket, removed another cigarette from the case—the last one—and smiled softly as he struck the match. His hand seemed to be shaking, or maybe it was only the building around us, rattling in fear. I remember wondering why on earth he should be so nervous as I was.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  When I returned to the château that evening, cold and thrilled, nerves vibrating to a strange new pitch, Hazel came to find me in my room. To warn me, she said. She had noticed the way I looked at the British doctor, and the way he looked at me.

  Warn me about what? I asked.

  She leaned forward and took my hands. She spoke in a whisper, the way you tell someone a terrible secret. I can still picture the sympathetic slant to her eyebrows.

  Because he was married, she said. Corporal Pritchard told her last night. He had a wife and a baby son, back home in England.

  July 28, 1919

  Dearest V,

  You will pardon my crude language, but there’s really no other way to express oneself in these conditions: Florida is bloody hot. (There, I’ve said it.) Indeed, if God should be so good as to send you back to me one day, and we should be so fortunate as to make a little family of our own, I should carry us all back to cooler climes for the course of the summer months, on my own back if necessary. The Adirondack Mountains, I hear, are suitable as a seasonal retreat; or else the primeval woodlands of Maine or of Washington State. Anywhere but England.

  I am in Miami at the moment, meeting with my bankers, who are not particularly pleased to see me. The company overdraft, it seems, has formed a most hideous scar on their balance sheets for some time. All my powers of persuasion are now put to the task of extracting a few coins of additional capital from their sticky paws, for the purpose of getting our business back into productive order. I am nothing if not persuasive, however—even you must allow me that virtue, having happily succumbed to my charm more than once, to my great and (I hope) everlasting fortune.